Posts from the ‘Carnaval Tropical de Paris’ Category

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PARIS IN JULY means that it must be summer – and summer means that it must be Carnival time.

Yesterday, the annual Carnaval Tropical de Paris took place around place de la Nation. Some 4,000 dancers in colourful costumes, dozens of floats and a cornucopia of drummers paraded through place de la Nation and then meandered for some 4.5 km through the 11th arrondissement. This is one of the highlights of the Parisian summer and there is little to compete with it for colour, sound and cultural diversity.

And this year was no exception. Yesterday, it took over four hours for the carnival to process from la Place de la Nation to le Boulevard Voltaire, la Place Léon Blum, l’Avenue Parmentier, la Rue du Chemin Vert, le Boulevard de Ménilmontant, l’Avenue Philippe Auguste and back to la Place de la Nation.

With the theme of Le sixième continent, the Sixth Continent, some 4,000 people from Martinique, Guadeloupe, Mayotte, La Réunion, French Polynesia, Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, China, Vietnam and other corners of the globe took part. This was a wonderful celebration of cultural diversity.

The best that can be said about our weather this summer is that it hasn’t been great but even so, we don’t usually expect a sudden tropical storm like the one that descended without warning yesterday afternoon.

Undaunted though, the carnival continued with everyone still in high spirits. Even as the last of the procession was making its soggy way into the distance the sounds of the crowd were as enthusiastic as ever.

Flickr Photos

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About

This blog is dedicated to my recordings of the street sounds of Paris … and occasionally, to some other things too. I specialise in street recordings mostly in binaural stereo. I take my inspiration from the great twentieth-century street photographers who walked the streets seeking that elusive 'decisive moment'. For most of our history we have used artefacts, architecture, pictures and words to create a vision of our past. It’s only in the last thirty seconds or so on our historical clock that we have been able to capture and record sound. Almost all our sonic heritage has passed by unrecorded. That is why I, and many others, are dedicated to recording and archiving the sounds around us so that future generations will have the sounds of our time to explore, to study and to enjoy.